Philebus

Summary

The Philebus begins in the middle of an argument. Philebus, a young hedonist who worships pleasure as the goddess Aphrodite, has grown tired of defending his claim that enjoyment and delight are the good for every living creature, and hands the position to his friend Protarchus. Socrates maintains that wisdom, intelligence, memory, right opinion and true reasoning are better than pleasure for all who can share in them. Before deciding between the two, he insists on a method: pleasure and knowledge are each one and many, and a careful thinker must count the kinds between the unity and the unlimited multitude. This method, he says, was tossed down to mortals by some new Prometheus. The first test is a thought experiment. Would Protarchus choose a life of intense pleasure with no mind, memory or calculation? Without memory he would not know he had been pleased; his life would be that of an oyster. Nor would anyone choose pure thought without pleasure. The good life must be a mixture, and the remaining question is which element deserves the credit for its goodness. To answer it Socrates divides all that exists into four kinds: the unlimited, which admits more and less; limit, which brings number and measure; the mixture of the two; and the cause of mixing, which he identifies with mind, the king of heaven and earth. Pleasure belongs with the unlimited, intelligence with the cause. The long central section examines pleasure itself. Bodily pain is the dissolution of a living creature's natural harmony and pleasure its restoration, as eating answers hunger and drinking thirst. Desire, however, cannot belong to the body alone, since a thirsty man reaches toward a filling he knows only through memory, so desire is of the soul. Pleasures can then be false: the soul is like a book in which a scribe writes opinions and a painter illustrates them, and anticipatory pleasures may depict things that will never be. Pleasures can be mixed with pain, as in scratching an itch, in the craving of fever, in the bittersweet emotions of anger and grief, and in the malice that laughs at a friend's self-ignorance at a comedy. Only a few pleasures are pure: those of clear colours, shapes, tones and smells, and of learning. Knowledge too is sorted, from the rough arts of guessing to exact sciences and to dialectic, the purest. Then Socrates and Protarchus, as cup-bearers, mix a drink from the honey of pleasure and the sober water of wisdom, admitting every kind of knowledge but only the true and harmless pleasures. At the vestibule of the good they find it under three aspects, beauty, proportion and truth, and rank the goods: measure first, proportion and beauty second, mind and wisdom third, sciences and right opinions fourth, pure pleasures fifth. For students the dialogue offers a demanding account of ordered enjoyment: pleasure is real and can be good, but it must be judged and measured by something higher than itself.

Top Lessons

• The oyster's life is not a human life

  Socrates' thought experiment shows that pleasure without memory, knowledge or foresight cannot even be enjoyed as ours. Human happiness requires a mind that remembers, judges and hopes; the dialogue therefore refuses both the pure hedonist and the bloodless intellectual.

• Measure as the mark of every good mixture

  Health, music, temperate seasons and beauty all appear when limit governs the unlimited. The Philebus teaches students to look for proportion as the sign of goodness, a theme that classical and Christian writers alike connected with the order of creation.

• False pleasures and the painter in the soul

  Pleasure can be false because it rests on judgments, and the soul writes and paints pictures of what it expects. Students can examine how anticipation, imagination and comparison distort enjoyment, and why disciplining the imagination is part of temperance.

• The cruelty hidden in laughter

  Socrates analyses the pleasure of comedy as a mixture of delight and envy at the self-ignorance of friends who think themselves richer, handsomer or wiser than they are. The passage is an early and searching account of malice in humour and of self-knowledge as the antidote.

• Pleasure ranks fifth, but it is not excluded

  The final mixing admits true and pure pleasures and keeps out those that bring madness and folly. The ranking places measure, beauty and mind above pleasure without despising it, offering a model of ordered love that students can compare with Augustine's teaching that goods must be loved in their right order.

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Medical Lens

The Philebus contains one of the earliest systematic accounts of pleasure and pain in physiological terms: pain as the dissolution of a creature's natural harmony, pleasure as its restoration, with hunger, thirst, heat and cold as examples. It argues that desire depends on memory and so belongs to the soul rather than the body, and it studies the intensified cravings of fever, the mixed sensation of itching and scratching, and the frenzy of excess. Mind is described as the cause that orders bodies and heals disease. Medicine itself appears as a conjectural art below the exact sciences. Readers interested in craving, reward and the psychology of anticipation will find suggestive parallels, but these are modern analogies; Plato's categories are philosophical and Hippocratic, not clinical.

• Stephanus 25e-26b

  Right combination of limit and unlimited produces health in disease and harmony in music; health is listed among the goods that arise from measure.

• Stephanus 30a-b

  The fourth kind, cause or mind, gives bodies souls and is responsible for self-management and the art of healing disease.

• Stephanus 31d-32b

  Pain as dissolution of natural harmony and pleasure as its restoration; hunger and thirst as emptying, eating and drinking as filling; heat and cold as unnatural separation and condensation.

• Stephanus 34c-35d

  Analysis of thirst as desire for replenishment; since the body is empty, only memory can reach toward filling, so desire belongs to the soul.

• Stephanus 44b-45e

  The 'enemies of Philebus', said to be skilled in natural science, deny pleasure exists; Socrates notes that the feverish feel thirst and cold more intensely and that the greatest pleasures are found in disease and wantonness.

• Stephanus 46a-47b

  Itching relieved by scratching, and inner burning treated by fire and cold, as examples of mixed pleasure-pain; excessive pleasure makes a man gasp, change colour and cry out.

• Stephanus 55e-56b

  Medicine, with music, farming and navigation, is classed among arts that rely on conjecture and practised guesswork rather than exact measurement.